There are a lot of advantages to having President Obama as your campaign cheerleader. He brings energy, wit and manifest rhetorical gifts. But, as Hillary Clinton learned on Tuesday, there is also a downside. He is an electrifying presence and accustomed to occupying center stage. And when he came to North Carolina for his first campaign event with the presumed Democratic presidential nominee, it seemed he could not help himself.

Scene-stealing pantomime
It began before he said a word. As Mrs. Clinton commended the man
she hopes to succeed, the president held forth silently behind her, seated in a chair like an honoree at an awards dinner. He started playing to the crowd as she spoke. He mock-cried when she mentioned his daughter’s 18th birthday. He wiped his brow in dramatic fashion when Mrs. Clinton invoked their grueling 2008 race. The audience chuckled on cue.
“We’re fired up and ready to go,” Mrs. Clinton said as she wrapped her introduction, echoing a favored Obama refrain.
He was on.
Sweet-talking the locals
Mrs. Clinton, by her own admission, is not entirely comfortable as a campaigner. “This is not easy for me,” she said at a debate this year, comparing her political skills unfavorably to those of her husband, former President Bill Clinton, and Mr. Obama.


It looked easy for Mr. Obama. Thrust again into campaign mode, with his sleeves up and no jacket in sight, the president appeared grateful for the chance to riff. Almost immediately, he bantered easily with the crowd about the state’s basketball and food. “I can’t go to your house to get food,” he said, staring back at an eager local, “though I’m sure you’re an excellent cook.”
Then he began returning the favor to Mrs. Clinton, showering her with praise as she listened attentively, if a bit robotically. On Twitter, David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s former senior strategist, questioned her body language. “Someone has GOT to give @HillaryClinton an alternative maneuver to the bobblehead nod,” he wrote.
Wooing the women
Throughout her two presidential runs, Mrs. Clinton has struggled at times with how — and how often — to appeal to her history-making potential as a female candidate.
Mr. Obama, with a bit of self-deprecation, showed no hesitation.
“Let’s be clear: She beat me ——” he began, as he described their primary debates.
“Yes, she did!” someone shouted.
“You don’t have to rub it in now,” the president said with a smile. “She beat me, you know, at least the first half, and then I just barely could play her to a draw.”
He lauded her tenacity and resolve “even when things didn’t go her way” — one of many allusions to her resilience on a day when her email scandal loomed especially large, if unspoken.
He repurposed the popular quote often attributed to Ann Richards, the former Texas governor, about Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire.
“She had to do everything I had to do, but she was like Ginger Rogers,” Mr. Obama said. “She had to do it backwards in heels.”
Playing on all platforms
Before the event began, word came over Mrs. Clinton’s Instagram page that the president would be “taking over her account” for part of the day.
But in his remarks Mr. Obama found occasion to highlight another medium, Twitter, more often associated with Donald J. Trump.
“Everybody can tweet,” he said. “But nobody actually knows what it takes to do the job until you’ve sat behind the desk.”
He waited a beat, before invoking his younger daughter: “I mean, Sasha tweets.”
Later, after arguing that other countries had grown fonder of the United States during his tenure, Mr. Obama returned to the well.
“You can look that up,” he said. “That’s not just something I made up and tweeted.”
Taunting Trump
Though he took care to avoid speaking his name, Mr. Obama proved he remains the Democratic pacesetter in Trump mockery, filleting the presumptive Republican nominee with uncommon zeal.
“Even Republicans on the other side don’t know what the guy’s talking about,” he said. “You can ask them. They’re all like, ‘I don’t know.’”
Giggles filled the room.
“Am I joking?” he continued. “No.”
Moments later, an admirer shouted, “Obama for the Supreme Court!” The president pressed on without acknowledging him.
By the end, though, as his speech neared 40 minutes, Mr. Obama allowed that he might be wearing out his welcome.
“You haven’t campaigned in a while,” he said, “you start enjoying it too much.”
culled from Newyork Times